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This Year

Articles and publications tagged This Year across the Atmosphere.

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MiscellanySep 4, 2026

September 4 - Animal Mask

Not sure I have much on this one. I'm kind of exhausted after a lot of week all at once. John says this one is an allegory for the birth of his son. It's very nice and I'll take him at his word.

MiscellanySep 3, 2026

September 3 - Foreign Object

Sometime songs revel in silliness to hide or ease something bleak. Mountain Goats are masters of the upbeat song with downbeat lyrics. Sometimes, as in yesterday's song, they're there to show that in times of darkness there is still light. The world might be bleak, but here is justice and triumph and fun. And sometimes the song is just a fucking laugh in itself. Everything about this song is just enjoyable violent silliness, delighting in the idea of the undefined and thus infinitely dangerous b...

MiscellanySep 2, 2026

September 2 - The Legend Of Chavo Guerrero

Quick content warning: the video for this song contains disgraced pro wrestler and abuser Joey Ryan. There's no nostalgia like bittersweet nostalgia, and John Darnielle is the source of some of the most bitter and some of the most sweet. The surface level of this song is a delightful romp through memory of Chavo Guerrero, a tremendous but relatively secondary figure in the days of the southwestern territories. These days he's largely known because of the tremendous success of his son (Chavo Jr) ...

MiscellanySep 1, 2026

September 1 - Southwestern Territory

OK, so we might be getting Extremely Into my Shit now. A Mountain Goats album not just about wrestling but about territories wrestling, and in particular a song about a journeyman making towns. Exactly my combination of dirt, pathos, and soaring instrumentation, about a subject I deeply love. Pro wrestling is such an interesting combination of incredibly personable and incredibly lonely. Crowded locker rooms, loud venues, dark roads, driving at unsociable hours because you'd rather make the driv...

MiscellanyAug 31, 2026

August 31 - Transcendental Youth

Another month gone, and a fine song to end it on. There's this thing about the title tracks on albums when they have them. They become (whether they mean to or not) the overture of the album. Transcentental Youth the album is about growing up and growing past, and growing away, being the young people shedding things even if what replaces them is scary or dangerous and learning lessons from it. Transcendental Youth the sing is the tribal anthem of this theme. A song to leave behind when the young...

MiscellanyAug 30, 2026

August 30 - Steal Smoked Fish

Some mountain goats songs are contemplative, some are frozen in horror, some are reminiscences. Some are celebrations, and not everything being celebrated is something that is traditionally thought of as being good. This song is an exultation of the joys of ferality, which is a different thing to wildness. A wild creature is born in the wild and lives there, and considers society to be entirely an external thing. A feral creature is one that lives in the civilised world without being part of it ...

MiscellanyAug 29, 2026

August 29 - Cry For Judas

If ever there was a platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats song it's this one. There are others that I go to first, but this has everything you need from a Mountain Goats song in its purest form. Absolutely flawless musicianship, a completely soaring vocal. Astonishingly clever lyrics. An absolute disconnect between song lyrics and musical style in the best way. This is a song about anger, frustration, knowing the world is broken, knowing this won't help, doing it anyway because that's what living i...

Given to Tri

Given to TriAug 29, 2026

Ironman 70.3 Coeur d’Alene close to being renewed for another three years

Half DistanceIronman 70.3 Coeur d’Alene

MiscellanyAug 28, 2026

August 28 - In Memory Of Satan

Sometimes a song hits you from an unexpected direction. This one is a song about, basically, losing it, letting the emotions out in ways that feel evilm, trying to come back together, not really managing it, but with only hald an hear on the lyrics it sounds like a song from an 80s TV show. Not the main theme, but perhaps what plays over the montage of the two friends who definitely aren't falling in love getting lunch at the restaurant in a department store.

MiscellanyAug 27, 2026

August 27 - Lakeside View Apartment Suite

This song is a bit of a time traveller. When I was listening to songs from We Shall All Be Healed, I kept waiting for this song as thematically it is such a song from that era. But actually it fits in just as well with these retrospective songs about youthful misery and growth. You can hear the tension of the bad situation in this song: the condition of the apartment, the guys in the crew who are going nowhere and serve as a crab bucket to drag you back. This remains one of my favourite Mountain...

MiscellanyAug 26, 2026

August 26 - Until I Am Whole

This isn't the album about loneliness, but this is very much a song about being alone in the sense of not wanting to subject other people to yourself. I've had that moment. When I first moved to Cambridge I was apart from my wife for several months, and I urgently wanted to be nowhere near anyone. Well, not anyone. I urgently wanted to be near someone who was thousands of miles away and I didn't want the rest of the world. It's not a great feeling, and sometimes the loneliness heals you, but som...

Advocate.com [Unofficial]Aug 24, 2026

Trans band teacher accepted an Iowa school job offer. Days before classes, the board blocked his hiring

Ace-riosDiscrimination

MiscellanyAug 23, 2026

August 23 - Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1

It's Sunday night, I'm tired, I've felt vaguely ill all weekend, and now I have to contend with one of the most enormous sounds Mountain Goats ever did. I first heard this song 3 or 4 years ago and it's been a guiding force in my life since then. On a personal level, this is an anthem for me because good god have there been points where keeping moving forward - shit, keeping moving in any direction - felt fucking impossible. Just staying alive was the achievement. Doing the things that let that ...

MiscellanyAug 22, 2026

August 22 - Sourdoire Valley Song

One of the hardest things in the world to fully accept, and one that's simultaneously deeply reassuring and deeply disturbing: we were always like this. And that's for a very broad definition of we and an only moderately broad definition of this. We like to think of people too far in the past as basically alien. This is especially true if you've read literature from long enough ago that the story forms didn't quite work, where our shared cultural assumptions aren't shared. But it's still true th...

MiscellanyAug 20, 2026

August 20 - Birth of Serpents

One of the best things about Mountain Goats songs is sometimes you will come across a line so perfect you have to wonder if it came from somewhere else and then conclude that it's original. A young man dwelling inside his body like an uninvited guest is a perfect way of describing the awkward pain of existence for young people who haven't found their place, who worry that they might not have a place, and who may be right. A lot of counter culture songs don't work because they - understandably - ...

MiscellanyAug 19, 2026

August 19 - Age Of Kings

There's something old school and epic and pulpy about this song. It's nostalgic and hopeful and sad and sweeping. I think it's the way it uses strings. They make it sound like we're watching a horizon while the silhouettes a caravan of furtive adventurers move towards destiny. I think Peter O'Toole's there, but old Peter O'Toole. This is romance in all its meanings. A love song and a song about love and also a song about the picaresque and romantic motions of heroism. It's proud and delightful a...

MiscellanyAug 18, 2026

August 18 - Liza Forever Minnelli

I'm unfamiliar with Hollywood and LA in general except as a place to visit, and even there I didn't do the classic Hollywood shit. I've spent more time in convenience stores in Hermosa Beach than within a mile of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet there is something in this song, of being stranded in the famous place, feeling the inability to escape. I only had one town I feared I'd never leave, and I shot out of there like a bullet from a gun. I've neither gone back nor felt the need to mental...

MiscellanyAug 17, 2026

August 17 - Beautiful Gas Mask

This song is, interestingly, much more of what I think of as a 90s song than anything Mountain Goats released in the 1990s. It has a lot of the instrumental tics that I think of as being true of the kind of bands who would be opening for REM or putting out a double A side with Throwing Muses. Instrumental, interesting, and lyrically clever at a level that I'm somewhat too tired to fully appreciate. The heat has broken here, I think. I hope. It will still be too warm in the day, and it only gets ...

MiscellanyAug 16, 2026

August 16th - The Autopsy Garland

Another rich vein of Mountain Goats songs: songs about Guys. This is a haunting and oppressive piece of music, one that sounds like night, the kind of night with something in it. There's a darkness in it, and some themes dealt with much more directly than in most Mountain Goats songs. Mentions of rich men loving their twelve year olds are direct and painful body blows, dangerous noises that let you know that someone had been exploited and someone had been failed. It's obviously a song about Judy...

MiscellanyAug 15, 2026

August 15th - For Charles Bronson

I love a good Mountain Goats biographical, almost as much as I love a good Mountain Goats instruction song where each line is something that the song's subject should or must do. I was in the wrong generation for Charles Bronson. I was born after his great performances (Dirty Dozen, Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape) so my reference points were a mix of films that people's dads liked that were played on Sundays during the day on BBC2, star of extremely ropy TV movies like Family Of Cops, and m...

MiscellanyAug 14, 2026

August 14th - Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece

This is a fragment of a story turned it not a different story. An inspiration from the culmination of an old film where Lon Chaney Jr's part was rewritten to contain almost no dialogue, apparently due to his recovery from surgery, with this song's title being part of his only dialogue. There is a delight in finding the art in shlock. The Indestructible Man is a short film of no real note and seemingly not a tremendous about of quality, but the motivation of the tragic monster at its core is enou...

MiscellanyAug 13, 2026

August 13th - Catherine Antrim's Kid

A couple of neat mini-genres coming together here. Mountain Goats demo tapes and extras, and Mountain Goats biographicals. This is the story - apocryphal and purposefully anachronistic - of Billy The Kid, a person who is these days almost entirely fiction. There's one photo, a handful of records and accounts, a number of very real murders, and a story so powerful it has outlasted any sense of the reality. What remains is essentially as folkloric an American creation as John Bunyan, considerably ...

MiscellanyAug 12, 2026

August 12 - Used To Haunt

This is a ghost story. And so obviously it's beautiful. The sort of warm piano that makes you feel like you're on a show on network television that's too sentimental to be a comedy and too funny to be a drama. This is a ghost story. And so it's actually a story about memory. The traces of people, the secrets they leave behind, the things you loved and hated and regretted about them, the things you miss about them. It's a song about where people aren't, and that's why it's fun and tragic at the s...

MiscellanyAug 11, 2026

August 11th - Bristol Hotel Sutra

Moving away from The Life Yet To Come but staying with God, this is a small but delightful devotional. It's about loving something greater in trying times, and finding ways to feel and express that love in times where the world feels loveless. While this isn't my favourite Mountain Goats song, this is one that sums up a particular aspect of who John is in fiery intensity. Faith shining through trauma. This would also be an essentially perfect song over the end credits of a Mountain Goats documen...